From Brecht, Artaud, and the Absurd to Sha Yexin and Gao Xingjian: Two Cases of Rapport de Fait

Cultural Euphoria Between China and the West

Reception of Western writers and their works and the importation of Western literary ideas into China have a history going back to the 1919 May Fourth Movement, when China was in the thick of its literary revolution, and when Western writers as different as Ibsen and Baudelaire and Western literary movements such as romanticism, realism, expressionism, symbolism, aestheticism, and so forth were being gobbled up, not necessary in chronological order, by Chinese literary reformists, as a means of modernizing China and its culture. Nowadays, it may sound passé to bring up the issue of Western influences on modern Chinese literature. However, in view of the cultural, political, and social context of contemporary China since the 1970s, this old-fashioned issue has taken on new dimensions, warranting further investigation, as it may provide new vistas for comparative literary studies.

Since the hoisting of the banner of the "four modernizations" (a proposal jointly made by Mao Zedong and Chou En-lain at the first meeting of the Third People's Congress in 1964 to modernize China's agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology by the end of the twentieth century) in the early seventies, China has been undergoing a literary renaissance, a blossoming in drama, poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. This upsurge has been accompanied by a greater degree of tolerance on the part of the authorities toward artistic experimentation, a greater flexibility as far as subject matter goes, and a more enthusiastic opening up to Western works and ideas. Of course, there have been intermittent slaps on the hand from the party-line ideology, but the tide of general enthusiasm and tolerance is still riding high.

The warm reception of Western literary works and ideas reflects a widespread desire among writers for something new and experimental, for an alternative to the handful of party-endorsed creative guidelines issued in the late 1970s; this desire is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the theater, which has witnessed, among many others, the performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet by the Old Vic Players from England and a production of Death of a Salesman directed by Arthur Miller himself, not to mention a Chinese homegrown production of Brecht's Galileo.

Western plays, ranging from the traditional to the avant-garde, have been translated into Chinese, and critical articles on Western drama have appeared in various journals. In the January 1979 issue of Wenyi luncong (文藝論叢) [A Collection of Literary Criticism], three articles were devoted to Shakespearean studies, covering such topics as his realism. The trend continued in the 1980s; there was a Chinese production of Othello and even a Chinese operatic version of Macbeth, which was performed at China's Shakespeare Festival in 1985. The extent of the interest and the volume of activities are too impressive to bode anything but good, and the excitement at the prospect of more Western plays being put on the Chinese stage and of the invigorating effects Western theater might have on the Chinese stage is unprecedented. One can almost say that there has never been so much cultural and theatrical euphoria shared between China and the West since 1949.

The extent of the assimilation and dissemination of Western dramatic works in China in the late twentieth century is made clear in the editorial of the first issue of Xiju yishu luncong (戲劇藝術論叢) [A Collection of Theater Criticism] in 1979, which states its objective of resuming, after a decade's interruption, the introduction of Western playwrights and dramatic theories to China. This trend continued into the 1980s and the 1990s when works from Pinter's Dumb Waiter (1990) and Landscape (1991), Genet's Bald Soprano (1991), and Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1991), both based on Gao Xingjian's (高行健) translations, to Dario Fo's The Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1998) were performed. Experimental works were occasionally staged that fused selected scenes from two plays, sometimes combining a Western play with a Chinese play, sometimes combining two Western plays, such as Lin Zhao Hua's (林兆華) 2003...